Suspect in child's shooting gets life for another case

By Craig Kapitan :
May 1, 2013
: Updated: May 1, 2013 10:17pm

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An ex-con who was implicated in a murder-for-hire plot when he was 15, in which a 10-year-old was shot in the head, received a life sentence Wednesday — for a different shooting.

Jassen Barnes, 33, was found guilty by a jury in March for the July 2011 shooting death of Justin Thomas outside an East Side apartment complex. Sobbing, Thomas' mother described her son taking his last breaths in her arms on the day before what would have been his 22nd birthday.

No motive for the shooting was mentioned to jurors or to state District Judge Maria Teresa Herr, who decided the sentence. As a habitual criminal with two prior trips to prison, Barnes faced a minimum term of 25 years.

Prosecutors Tanner Neidhardt and Thom Nisbet spent much of the hearing focusing on the March 1995 shooting in which the 10-year-old had to be taken by helicopter to the hospital. He had been sleeping on the couch in a house that Barnes was accused of having targeted with a 12-gauge shotgun. He survived.

“We woke up to loud sounds of boom! boom! boom! boom! all over the house,” Connie Hernandez testified as prosecutors displayed a picture of her son's bloody pillow. “I was devastated. I didn't know if he was going to live or die.”

A woman who was in high school at the time said Barnes and another teen ordered her to be his driver that night. Barnes was known by the nickname “Little Homicide,” she said.

Barnes was charged with capital murder for hire, but the case was later dropped by the district attorney's office. He did his best to intimidate witnesses, at one point asking another inmate to kill a man who was considering cooperating with investigators, prosecutors alleged. He was eventually caught bragging about the incident.

“Remember I beat a murder case when I was 15 years old,” Barnes said in a telephone call from the jail that was recorded and played for the judge.

Defense attorneys Ina Minjarez and Stephanie Boyd declined to call witnesses but asked the judge for a minimum sentence, pointing out repeatedly that the attempted capital murder charge was never pursued.

“I believe this time in prison will serve as a wake-up call for Mr. Barnes,” Minjarez argued. “He will learn from this experience.”

Outside the courtroom, Leslie Cornelius wore a bandana with her son's image around her neck as she hugged family members and wept.

“I hope he's in heaven playing his basketball,” she said of her son. “I'm glad (Barnes) got life in prison because he won't be able to hurt anyone else.”